Summer School for Geeks: 11 New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

If you're planning on hanging out with any cool geeks this summer, you definitely won't want to admit that all you've read lately is Fifty Shades of Grey. And now that Game of Thrones is an HBO show, no one's going to be impressed that you've heard of A Song of Ice and Fire.

So here's a list of some of this summer's most buzz-worthy geek science fiction and fantasy books. Drop a few of these into casual conversation, and it'll establish beyond any doubt that you're a true geek who's up on the latest trends.

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Redshirts

By John Scalzi

Megapopular writer John Scalzi's Whatever blog is often described as one of the few websites with a readable comments section, thanks to his strict policy of culling offensive posts — a process he refers to as "wielding the Mallet of Loving Correction." He's also known for posting oddly manipulated photos of himself and putting bacon on his cat. He writes novels, too, such as the Hugo-nominated Old Man's War, about elderly citizens given fresh young bodies and sent into space to fight aliens.

Scalzi is at heart a humorist — his novel The Android's Dream opens with a chapter-long fart joke — though the difficulties of marketing humorous science fiction have often caused publishers to downplay that. But Redshirts, which is being advertised as a Star Trek parody, may signal that Scalzi has achieved a profile sufficient enough to be beyond such worries. Redshirts concerns low-ranking crew members aboard an interstellar starship who start to notice a disturbing pattern — folks like themselves never seem to make it home safe from alien worlds, whereas high-ranking officers always seem strangely untouched by the danger.

Read if you like:Star Trek, black humor, aliens eating humans

2312

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Most science fiction is full of faster-than-light starships exploring the galaxy, despite the fact that such ships are almost certainly impossible. In 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson takes a more measured approach, proving along the way that one solar system provides plenty of real estate for adventure and intrigue.

Built on the slightly jokey premise of a romance between a "mercurial" woman from Mercury and a "saturnine" man from Saturn, 2312 is a riveting thriller in which diabolical schemes are hatched with the aid of quantum computers, many of Earth's colonies have replaced capitalism with the Mondragon Accord, and humans live centuries and swap genders at will. Robinson also mines some of his best ideas from earlier works, such as the terraforming of Mars (from his epic Mars trilogy), an Earth ravaged by climate change (from his Science in the Capital series), and a city on Mercury that circles the planet to remain always in the temperate zone between night and day (from his early novel The Memory of Whiteness). Gorgeous writing, compelling characters and plenty of gosh-wow speculation built on a solid foundation of known science make this a treat for readers hungry for a more plausible space adventure.

Read if you like: realistic extrapolations about what human civilization might look like in coming centuries

Crucible of Gold

By Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik struck gold in 2006 with the release of her first novel, His Majesty's Dragon, a charming adventure that combined fire-breathing dragons with historically accurate, Patrick O'Brien-style Napoleonic naval warfare. She soon quit her day job working on computer games such as Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide in order to focus on her Temeraire universe, which now includes seven novels and a handful of short stories (and has been optioned by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson).

Novik, who cut her teeth writing fan fiction, is also involved with the Organization for Transformative Works, which advocates for the rights of fanfic writers and seeks to legitimize their work. Previous Temeraire books have taken the characters to various far-flung locales, including China, Africa and Australia, and the latest, Crucible of Gold, explores what a historical Brazil might look like in a world full of dragons.

Throne of the Crescent Moon

By Saladin Ahmed

Throne of the Crescent Moon is the debut novel by Saladin Ahmed, who's made quite a name for himself in recent years with a handful of gorgeously realized short stories such as "Mister Hadj's Sunset Ride" and "Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela." Ahmed, whose poetry has earned him a number of prestigious fellowships, writes prose that's colorful and evocative, but he's equally influenced by sword-and-sorcery tales and Dungeons & Dragons, and his work is bursting with zany antics, witty banter and grotesque monsters.

This novel follows the adventures of the aging, jaundiced ghoul hunter Adoulla Makhslood, who's forced to take on a serious-minded young acolyte named Raseed bas Raseed. Ahmed, raised in an Arab enclave outside Detroit, is knowledgeable about Middle Eastern culture and customs, and those details help raise this book above other tales set in an Arabian Nights-inspired milieu. Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first in a series, with future volumes promising even greater sweep, as the Crescent Moon Kingdoms become embroiled in their own version of the Crusades.

Read if you like: books that combine a deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture with ghoul hunting

Blackout

By Mira Grant

Blackout is the third book in the Newsflesh trilogy, which chronicles the adventures of a group of bloggers living 20 years after a zombie apocalypse. What separates these books from the hordes of zombie fiction currently crowding bookshelves is the extraordinary care with which the author establishes a scientific basis for her zombie virus.

Grant, a longtime hobbyist in the area of virology, read numerous textbooks, audited several college courses, and phoned the Centers for Disease Control countless times in the course of developing her fictional pandemic. (She was able to get a foot in the door at the CDC because the receptionist recognized her as the singer/songwriter behind "The Black Death," a Schoolhouse Rock-style song propounding the notion that the Black Death in Europe was actually hemorrhagic fever rather than bubonic plague. The song has gone — pardon the expression — viral.) The first two books in the series, Feed and Deadline, were both nominated for the Hugo award.

Read if you like: zombies or stories about viral outbreaks

Arctic Rising

By Tobias Buckell

Caribbean-born Tobias Buckell wrote the Xenowealth series, which includes the novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose. They are all set in a far future in which interstellar travel is commonplace, and focus heavily on characters and communities whose ancestors lived in the Caribbean. As well as being a New York Times best-selling author, Buckell is also a popular tech blogger, and is currently at the vanguard of authors using Kickstarter to release books outside the traditional publishing model (including his fourth Xenowealth novel, The Apocalypse Ocean).

His latest book, Arctic Rising, is a near-future ecothriller about the conflict over who should exploit natural resources made accessible by the melting of the north polar ice cap — a story that's been in the news recently after Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess) was arrested while attempting to disrupt one such expedition. Arctic Rising was recently reviewed by Alan Cheuse on NPR, who remarked, "If you count on good thrillers to be told in clear, engaging prose and made up of interesting psychology, state-of-the-art research and swiftly moving plots, you couldn't be in a better place. This one will give you shivers, even as it makes you sweat."

Read if you like: fast-paced thrillers dealing with real-world issues

The Killing Moon

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin came to prominence in 2010, when her debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a fantasy adventure in which imprisoned gods stalk the hallways of an ancient fortress, was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, and ranked as one of the Top 5 fantasy and science fiction novels of the year by Amazon.com.

The Killing Moon marks the start of a new story, this one set in a richly imagined fantasy milieu vaguely reminiscent of ancient Egypt, in which a caste of priests harvests the dreams of sleepers and uses them to power their spells. The protagonist Ehiru is one of these priests, but his loyalty is tested when one of his funereal rites goes awry and his patient utters a chilling warning: "They are using you." Unlike with much epic fantasy, fans won't be left hanging waiting for the ending of this story, which concludes in the second volume, The Shadowed Sun, out now.

Read if you like: rich world-building, exotic locales, political intrigue

Shadow Ops: Control Point

By Myke Cole

Military science fiction is a healthy subgenre within the field, with publishers like Baen releasing a steady output of war stories set among the stars. Most follow in the footsteps of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, presenting the exploits of power-armored soldiers sent to fight monsters on hellish alien worlds, or else deal with the decisions of commanders, such as David Weber's Honor Harrington series, which as been described as Horatio Hornblower in space.

Military fantasy is somewhat rarer. Most fantasies contain plenty of battles, but few really focus in a realistic way on the day-to-day lives of soldiers. (Glen Cook's Black Company novels are perhaps the best-known example.) But Myke Cole's debut Shadow Ops: Control Point is something rarer still, a military fantasy that deals with realistic, contemporary characters. Cole, who was himself a military contractor in Iraq and later served as a Coast Guard officer, brings plenty of personal experience to his tale of modern-day soldiers who live through a supernatural upheaval that imbues many of them with magical powers — some of which are too powerful to be controlled, and put them at odds with their own government.

Fair Coin

By E. C. Myers

E. C. Myers, whose blog The Viewscreen undertakes to review every last episode of Star Trek, is a veritable encyclopedia of geek pop culture, and he puts his knowledge to good use in his debut novel Fair Coin, a young-adult science fiction adventure that presents a fresh spin on the old idea of "be careful what you wish for."

The book focuses on a young man named Ephraim whose life suddenly gets strange when he learns that his alcoholic mom tried to kill herself after a perfect duplicate of Ephraim was found dead earlier that day. The duplicate carries a coin that Ephraim soon learns can grant wishes — but only when it lands on heads. (When it lands on tails, there's no telling what might happen.) The book is very much in the tradition of William Sleator, who, sadly, died last year, and whose novels often dealt with nerdy teens facing moral conundrums after stumbling across great power. It's an important space in the literary landscape, and one that Fair Coin fills ably and with page-turning charm, which led io9 to dub the book "pure awesome crack."

Read if you like: young adult science fiction with relatable characters and a strong moral core, crack

Nightshifted

By Cassie Alexander

A registered nurse by day, Cassie Alexander maintains a blog discussing her travails working in the U.S. health care system. Her new novel, Nightshifted, the first in a trilogy, concerns a young nurse named Edie Spence who takes on a dangerous and secretive assignment in order to afford her brother's medical bills — she accepts a posting on hospital floor Y4, where unusual patients such as vampires, werewolves and zombies are housed, and soon finds herself caught up in a struggle between warring factions of supernatural monsters.

Alexander combines fun fantasy and romance with the very real problems faced by working nurses, and her background lends the hospital setting and gruesome monsters a more realistic edge. Urban fantasies and medical dramas are both popular right now, so there are probably plenty of readers who'd like to see the two combined, which raises the issue — what's scarier, zombies or HMOs?

Armored

Edited by John Joseph Adams

This was supposed to be a top 10 list, but I decided to throw in a freebie. Armored is the latest anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, my co-host on the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast here at Wired. He was called "the reigning king of the anthology world" by Barnes & Noble after his zombie anthology The Living Dead and post-apocalyptic anthology Wastelands became massive hits, and his new book is the first-ever original anthology featuring stories of power armor (Starship Troopers, Iron Man) and giant robot mechs (Battletech).

Authors include Brandon Sanderson, Alastair Reynolds, Carrie Vaughn, Tanya Huff, Jack Campbel and Daniel H. Wilson — whose breakout novel Robopocalypse is currently being adapted by Steven Spielberg. While military science fiction dominates the book, there are plenty of other takes as well, from steampunk armor to mechs used for underwater salvage. (Full disclosure: Armored also includes my short story "Power Armor: A Love Story," about an inventor from the future who never takes off his invincible armor for fear of a lurking assassin.)

Read if you like: power armor (And who doesn't like power armor?)

Blowback: What Geeky Book Is Next on Your Reading List?

You’ve probably got your own hot picks about what to read this summer. Drop your most-anticipated books in the comments below.